gmail offline with prism on linux
14 December 2009, 00:26
As I said here before, I am a mozilla prism user and I really like the fact to have my email (an important application) separated from my browser. If only to have two separate task bar entry but also so misbehaving sites won’t crash the whole email + browser deal (I often have more than 20 or so tabs open)… Anyway that’s not today’s point.
When I read that offline gmail was going official (also add to that the fact that I was already enjoying offline email access in the metro with my android) I decided I wanted to give it a try (through prism of course!). I never thought it would be that complicated.
Links and fix details after the explanation
First, prism doesn’t advertises itself as a version of firefox to extensions so when you try to install google gears (required for offline access) it just plainly tells you that your browser is unsupported. To fix that, you need to modify the gears’ extension installation metadata so it will install itself over prism.
Then, there is another hard-coded version check in gears extension (introduced in 0.5.30.0) so you need to modify another file in the extension’s distribution. Took me a little while to figure that one out since there was no error message whatsoever.
As I already suffered through these steps myself, I just modified the gears extension and tested that it worked for myself (linux + firefox 3.5 + prism 1.0b2) and, as a gift (we’re near christmas), here’s the file:
- Download (link above by the way)
- open your prism-enabled gmail, click on the bottom-right corner on the prism menu, select tools then add-ons
- drag and drop the .xpi you just downloaded into the add-ons window
- restart your prism and enable offline gmail (in settings -> offline)
For the gory details, check the links below, these guys did all the work (but for mac, so I post for the linux guys).
Related links:
— Olivier Bilodeau
